


Children Of The Sea

by Kemmasandi



Category: One Piece
Genre: Character Study, Gen, idk how else to tag this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2019-05-10 03:32:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14729150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kemmasandi/pseuds/Kemmasandi
Summary: In which Ace fulfils a long-ago promise.





	Children Of The Sea

 

A couple of weeks after the fire in Grey Terminal, Dadan sits Ace and Luffy down for a talk. 

“Listen, you boys,” she says, sitting cross-legged on the dusty floorboards, close enough for them to reach out and touch if they want. Luffy does; he clambers into her lap, wrapping his rubber arms around her ten times over. Dadan winces, but makes no move to push him off, the way she might have two weeks ago.

“Listen,” she says, “I want you both to promise me something.”

Luffy lifts his head from her paunchy stomach. His eyes are glistening. He hasn’t been far from tears since Sabo died. “Promise what?” he says, and sniffles.

Dadan looks down at him, then up and over to where Ace sits, defiantly dry-faced. Over the last few months she’s lost most of the fear she used to look at him with -- not that she’d admit she ever did, but Ace is more familiar with what fear looks like than any kid his age should be. Today her eyes are old and tired. There’s a little fear, but it’s distant, as if she’s looking at something looming behind him.

She sighs, and inexpertly returns Luffy’s octopus hug. “Promise me that you’ll live each day like it’s your last. Fuck knows it could be. Sabo’s dead, and I don’t want either of you following him any sooner than you have to, but if you’ve got to, then it’s better to die regretting what you did than what you never got the chance to do.”

Luffy sniffles again. The sound grates on Ace’s senses, but he’d sooner die than let Luffy know it. The kid is a crybaby because he tears up over broken corn plants and particularly large beetles. Not because of Sabo. Crying over a brother’s death is a man’s right.

“I promise,” says Ace. His voice comes out dry and raspy. “I won’t regret anything.”

Dadan nods. An orange dreadlock slips over her shoulder as she hugs Luffy a little tighter. “Look after yourselves, kids.”  
  


* * *

  
Ace doesn’t regret challenging Whitebeard, even after three months trying and failing to take the man’s head.

He’s been called a monster his whole life: bad blood, a calamity, son of the devil. It was inevitable that he’d turn his face toward the Grand Line eventually, the refrain drumming in his head: _this is where the monsters go._ Playing with Luffy and Sabo, he had sometimes forgotten the monstrous legacy that hid beneath his skin. After Sabo died, he stopped trying to forget.

Over the years, the story of the monster left Dawn Island. The first stop in Ace’s pirate career is a town on an island a day’s sailing west from Fuusha. He’s recognised in a pub, and the man who does the recognising isn’t smart enough to keep it to himself. Ace walks out into the street, and a gang of ten or so men surrounds him.

He leaves that town with bleeding knuckles and an official kill count. Garp left him two things to be grateful for: his mother’s name, and, admittedly, a damn good punch.

That punch later becomes his signature, an attack the newspapers nickname Fire Fist. Ace laughs and throws away the paper the first time he sees it in print. Even Luffy could have come up with a better name.

By the time he and his crew sail into the Grand Line, Ace has a bounty of forty-five million beries. His epithet is not ‘monster’, as he was half-expecting, but ‘Fire Fist’.

Whitebeard’s crew is full of monsters.

Coming from Ace, that’s almost a compliment. Monsters are something familiar. He can work with that.

What’s harder is that none of them seem to return the sentiment. They look at him with indulgence and amusement, no matter how hard he tries to kill them. It’s fucking _infuriating_.

He tries to make them fear him. They laugh when Whitebeard backhands him through three walls and over the side of the ship, _in his sleep_. The fishman commander drags Ace hacking and coughing out of the sea, and the crossdresser checks to make sure he hadn’t started drowning. Ace swats the man away, snarling.

He tries to make them respect him. They grin and shake their heads when he steals a crewman’s zanbatō, and Whitebeard snatches him out of the air by the weapon’s blade, snapping it in half and sending him pinging off into the rigging like a misfiring rubber band. Whitebeard apologises to the zanbatō’s owner while Ace screams wordlessly in the background. This seems to unnerve the crew more than the assassination attempts.

He gives up on trying to make the Whitebeard Pirates do anything except react. This too ends in failure. After a while, they barely seem to notice him anymore.

After a while, there’s nothing left to try.

Ace sits by the railing at the ship’s figurehead, crosses his arms against his knees and rests his forehead against his arms. Night fell a long time ago, and he’s exhausted. Through the wood at his back, he feels the Moby Dick ride the gentle swell of the ocean, waves breaking and lapping against the hull of the great ship. By the faint shouts and music that comes drifting through the salt air, the Whitebeard Pirates are throwing themselves a party down at the stern.

Footsteps sound against the deck, faint but drawing closer. The back of Ace’s neck prickles. He cracks open his eyes, squinting out through the crook of his elbow.

 _Watch out for the quiet ones_ , Dadan used to say. Marco is the quiet one of Whitebeard’s commanders. He’s always off in the corner somewhere, looking insufferably bored, but Ace has barely heard him speak except to pass his captain’s orders along.

Marco comes within a couple of feet of him, then stops. _Yeah, that’s right,_ Ace begins to think, _don’t get too close to the monster,_ but then Marco kneels and reaches out, and in his hand is a bowl. Steam rises out of a meat and vegetable broth and suddenly Ace realises he’s barely eaten for three months.

“What do you want?” he asks. His voice cracks. Trust is an exercise in faith he’s mostly used up.

Marco places the bowl on the deck by Ace’s boots. “Nothing, really.”

His voice is light, and kind of attractive if Ace is really honest with himself. It’s too bad he’s Whitebeard’s first division commander, because that makes him one more obstacle standing in the way of Ace’s ambition and Ace _hates_ obstacles. This is the first in a long time that he’s come across something he couldn’t just punch through.

Ace’s lips curl in the beginnings of a snarl. “Everyone wants something.”

Marco smiles, but he doesn’t laugh, not yet. “And after we get it, what then?”

Ace lifts his head. “Nobody gets everything they want.”

“No,” Marco admits, and his smile turns distant, like he’s looking at something looming behind Ace. “But some of us come close, if we’re lucky.”

Ace really does snarl this time. “Why are you talking to me?”

“Because your first mate tells me you’re not always this angry.” Marco blinks lazily, turns to his pockets and produces a pair of chopsticks. “And Thatch told me to bring this out to you.”

Ace glances down at the gently-steaming bowl. His stomach rumbles, loudly.

“Eat,” says Marco, and rises to his feet. “I won’t have the press say we’re starving you.”

Marco turns to leave, and Ace calls out after him. “Wait.”

He can’t believe he’s considering it, but at this point he has nothing left to lose. If the Whitebeard Pirates won’t recognise him as a monster, then that’s not the only thing Ace has ever been.

(Once, a little blonde kid called him ‘ _brother_ ’.)

“Why do you call him your father?”

Marco smiles.

“Because he calls us his sons.”  
  


* * *

  
Portgas D. Ace dies with a smile on his lips, rescued by a thousand brothers and protecting one more.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote most of this last year sometime, I think - it was originally going to be part of a larger story but I kinda forgot where I was going with it, so. [shrugs] Sorry for that ending.


End file.
